OK; superior "to my ears" should cover that.
Thanks Pau, yes, I suppose it does depend on what you want to hear, hence my reference to the "purely subjective".
Being myself from a professional background in sound recording, and still involved (despite being not far behind you in years!), I am most interested in hearing what original recordings, particularly of the early stereo era, actually sound like, rather than some restorer's arbitrarily tarted-up version. The key point for me is that what one hears from the original is exactly what the production team signed off on as "good", bearing in mind that at the professional studio end, monitoring systems were pretty good then even by today's standards, so one shouldn't have to make allowances for "old sound".
What concerns me, and prompted my original post, is that the amended ASZ survey declares the HDTT re-hash "superior" to the (unspecified) RCA reissue, and by use of an unqualified absolute, the decision is apparently final! Just because a reviewer likes something better doesn't necessarily mean it is better.
Des, I'm with you until you bring in The Mona Lisa, which I take to be the original master tape considered as some sort of Platonic form that a recording must reproduce as exactly as possible.
But the quest for the original sound-object to be reproduced is itself impossible. The original sound-object, if there is one, would be what the musicians played, in the acoustic environment where they were playing, as modified by atmospheric conditions (humidity, barometric pressure, etc.) all mediated by an individual human being's faculty of hearing, from a certain location within that space.
When I evaluate a recording, my criterion is my cumulative sense, in a lifetime of concert-going, of what music sounds like in a good acoustic environment--and "good" cannot mean identical--there are different kinds of "good."
Because I am 77 years old, my hearing is not as it was fifty years ago. Even two people of the same age, without impairment, will not hear exactly the same thing. And we all make our own choices of audio equipment, which further mediates what we experience.
I have been collecting HDTT recordings not because I think they resurrect the sound of the original master tape, but because usually they improve on commercial reissues of the same recording. Sometimes the improvement is startling: the 1962 Munch/BSO Fantastique, the Markevitch Rite of Spring, the Monteux LSO Daphnis et Chloë. Sometimes it is slight--they haven't been able to muck all the mud out of the Bruno Walter/Columbia Symphony Brahms symphonies, but they're subtly improved.
The only Pristine Audio recording I have so far is Arthur Bodansky's 1937 recording of _Siegfried_, which they call one of their most difficult projects. It still sounds like a very old recording, but I can hear Melchior, Flagstad, and Schorr in sound that doesn't set my teeth on edge, and for that I'm grateful.
Mention now of the RCA reissue of Reiner's 1954 ASZ raises the question "which one?". There have been several since the dawn of the digital era. The early ones, I suspect, followed a cynical industry practice of digitising copy-masters only, such as prepared for LP production, simply because they were there and ready to go. Their sound therefore was less than optimal.
But in 2004 RCA released the hybrid SACD version which promised to be the real deal. This disc, although apparently deleted, is still widely available at reasonable cost. It was from the series of Living Stereo reissues that RCA had transferred, allegedly from the original mastertapes, by Soundmirror Inc, much admired in the MWI review pages as also engineering for the likes of Reference Recordings. For the SACD transfers, the original 3-channel tapes were used where they existed. This particular Reiner recording was apparently stereo only.
If we are to rely on manufacturers' blurb, then this is what RCA/Soundmirror had to say: "In remastering these tapes, we kept the signal path as short as possible. A Studer-Aria analog tape recorder was connected with premium Siltech cabling directly to specifically chosen dCS converters. This DSD data is directly encoded onto the SACD. Thus the listener is able to hear the output of these converters exactly as we heard it in the studio. The DSD program is essentially identical to the analog tape. What you hear are faithful copies of each historic recording - the pure performance, presented in its original splendor. No signal processing was necessary to 'improve' these extraordinary tapes."
So, despite RCA's hyperbole and name-dropping, can any of Pristine, HDTT, Restoration Archive, etc. really beat that? For recordings of this era, the restoration business relies largely on, at best, secondary rather than protected, costly original sources. For this Reiner recording, HDTT cite an ordinary RCA Red Seal commercial tape, the usually coy Pristine don't disclose any source that I can see, and as for Restoration Archive's "taken from 20th Century digital transfers", what does that mean? Whose transfers? And from what sources?
The restoration business also relies heavily on the modern miracle of digital audio workstations, which even in their most modest form as downloadable freeware can do the most amazing things with any recording. I know, I use one myself, and so can you! In the twinkling of an eye you can apply noise reduction, click removal, speed and pitch correction, tonal equalisation, "ambient stereo", and a myriad of other effects.
Rather leave it up to somebody else? That's fine, but be aware that any intervention is a process of technical and quality decisions that reflect not only the restorer's own taste, but their growing certainty about what pushes certain collectors' and critics' buttons.
So, would you prefer the allegedly original, untrammeled transfer of Reiner's ASZ on the aforementioned RCA, or the restorers' most likely unoriginal, processed alternatives? Purely subjective, of course, depending perhaps on whether you like a bit of lipstick on your Mona Lisa.
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